Job, Career, Calling

You may have heard the parable about three stonecutters who were working at the side of a road. When asked what they were doing, the first replied, “I am making a living.” The second said, “I am doing the best job of stonecutting in my country.” And the final one proclaimed, “I am building a grand cathedral.”

These three responses relate to what we talked about in Chapter Six: the three kinds of subjective orientation people often have with their work. Those with jobs tend to focus more on the financial rewards of working than on any pleasure or fulfillment. Many of these individuals may find their true enjoyment outside of their nine-to-five existences. Those with careers focus primarily on growing their talent and advancement. While they may gain quite a bit of satisfaction in their work, it is often associated with the esteem that comes from external sources (like recognition or raises). The lucky few who pursue a calling find their work fulfilling in its own right, without regard for money or advancement. Those pursuing their calling would recognize Maslow's statement in their own life: “One must respond to one's fate or one's destiny or pay a heavy price. One must yield to it; one must surrender to it. One must permit one's self to be chosen.”

You can see in the figure below that each of these three approaches to work correspond to a different level of the Transformation Pyramid (survive, succeed, transform) and the Employee Pyramid (money, recognition, meaning).

How do you know which level you, your friends, family, or work associates would be placed on this pyramid? Take the following test, although beware that your answers will be influenced by your current state of mind, which means you may want to take the test twice, at least one week apart, to really gauge your accurate score. Read each of the following statements and place a check next to the five that best describe your relationship with your current work. Be careful, as it's easy to think broadly about how certain statements should reflect your work life. What we're looking for here are the statements that actually reflect your work life today:

1. While I enjoy what I do at work and am very good at it, I often feel like I've topped-out, and I have to look elsewhere—my home, my spiritual life, my friends, my hobbies, my community service—for inspiration or fulfillment.
2. I tend to lose myself in my work. I just feel like I'm in the flow, and I lose all sense of time.
3. I like what I do, but I don't expect a lot from my work. It just provides what I need to do the other more important things in my life. I enjoy my leisure life more than my work life.
4. My work truly makes a difference in the world.
5. The greatest experience I have at work is when I'm truly recognized by others for what I've accomplished.
6. If I had to choose between receiving a 10 percent raise at work or finding a new best friend at work, I would probably choose the raise.
7. I often feel like the work I'm doing is coming from some greater source than just me. It's like I'm channeling this energy or talent, and I'm amazed by its power.
8. I'm often not that excited to go to work on Monday morning.
9. My goal in life is to rise to the top of my field.
10. There are moments when I think to myself, “If I were independently wealthy, I'd probably still be doing this work.” I do what I do because I just love it.
11. I've thought pretty deeply about where my work will take me the next 10 years and what I need to do to excel in this field.
12. I'm pretty conscious to use my vacation time and sick days off so that I can create more balance and ensure that work doesn't dominate my life.
13. I often feel like my work allows me to show the real me. My work lets me use my deepest creative gifts.
14. I think work is overrated when you consider what percentage of our lives we spend working as compared to enjoying life. I don't think much about work when I'm not there.
15. I will do what it takes to become a success in my work.

Okay, I know that wasn't easy. You may have had a hard time trimming down to just five, or you may have found it difficult finding five statements that represent your perspective on your work. Here's how we'll score them. The following statements reflect someone who has a job perspective: 3, 6, 8, 12, and 14. The career statements are 1, 5, 9, 11, and 15. The calling statements are 2, 4, 7, 10, and 13.

How many did you have in each category? Your dominant category will tell you a lot about your relationship with your work. If your dominant category wasn't calling, don't be alarmed because most people find their calling outside of their work, whether it's as a Girl Scout leader, a gardener, a triathlete, a devoted friend, or an ardent political activist.

Michael Novak has written a fascinating book, Business as a Calling, that examines both the religious underpinnings of the idea of a calling and the characteristics that define a calling. He identifies four qualities that best define the experience of a calling:

1. “Each calling is unique to each individual.”

   This suggests there are subtleties as customized as our fingerprints in how we are called by our inherent gifts.

2. “A calling requires certain preconditions. It requires more than desires; it requires talent.”

   Not everyone can have a particular calling; it must fit our abilities. And there must be a willingness to put up with what some might see as the monotony associated with living out this calling. Essayist Logan Pearsall Smith once wrote, “The test of a vocation is the love of drudgery it involves.”

3. “A true calling reveals its presence by the enjoyment and sense of renewed energies its practice yields us.”

   Some activities drain us, and others fill us up. While following a calling can create fatigue in the moment, especially when the activity is intensive, the called person typically feels renewed and refreshed by pursuing this activity.

4. “They are not usually easy to discover.”

   Callings don't tap you on the shoulder and say, “I'm here.” Public education doesn't even speak this language, so quite often we get disconnected early in life from our true callings. Those who have found their calling are more likely to be what Maslow called “peakers.”²

Although Novak's book has a strongly religious bent to it, the reality is that secular folks are just as likely to feel disappointed by not finding their calling. Others have a sense of their calling but are preoccupied with the mundane commitments we all have in our lives. Don't despair if you haven't found or pursued your calling in work. For some, it is just a matter of timing. Both Colonel Sanders and McDonald's Ray Kroc were nearly 60 years old when their empires were born. As was the controversial capitalist Armand Hammer. And we all know about late-blooming artist Grandma Moses, but perhaps it is not as widely known that Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when Little House on the Prairie was first published. And Mary Baker Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor at the age of 87.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is an authority on the idea of flow, the state in which people find themselves when everything just seems to come together perfectly. Often, the idea of flow is compared with the self-actualized place a person pursuing a calling may be in. He cites in his book Good Business that the Gallup Organization found that “between 15 percent and 20 percent of adults never seem to experience flow, while a comparable number claim to experience it every day. The other 60 percent to 70 percent report being intensely involved in what they do anywhere from once every few months to at least once a week.”³ These results are encouraging, as it suggests that a large percentage of us have the capacity to transcend to the higher levels of the pyramid once we find our special place in life.

The Qualities of a Self-Actualized Person

Maslow seemed to agree with the Gallup survey when he wrote 40 years earlier, “What seems to distinguish those individuals I have called self-actualizing people, is that in them these episodes (peak experiences) seem to come far more frequently, and intensely and perfectly than in average people. This makes self-actualization a matter of degree and of frequency rather than an all-or-none affair.”⁴ Maslow believed that those living out their calling spent more of their time in a self-actualized place. He listed a number of qualities that define the “peaker” in a state of self-actualization:

• “For the transcenders, peak experiences…become the most important things in their lives, the high spots, the validators of life, the most precious aspect of life.”
• “Peakers cultivate periods of quiet, meditation” and getting out of their day-to-day normal life in order to see the world in a new way and as a way to “try to recover the sense of the miraculous about life.”
• “They seem somehow to recognize each other, and to come to almost instant intimacy and mutual understanding even upon first meeting.”
• When in a state of a peak experience, the peakers have a lessening of fears, a giving up of ego, a spontaneity and sense of seeking, and a fusion of feeling “one with the world.”

Edward Hoffman's biography on Maslow, Future Visions, is a great source of recommendations for how to cultivate a state of self-actualization. In the book, he lists more than 40 suggestions Maslow made for achieving this state. Viktor Frankl in his landmark book Man's Search for Meaning has a relevant suggestion that will help give you the courage to seek your calling: “Live life as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”⁵

Using Pyramids to Set Priorities

As we've found in this book, pyramids are powerful. They represent a unique organizing principle that suggests some things in your life are foundational, and others are at the peak. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is akin to the principle of homeostasis, which is how your furnace thermostat works. When it gets too cold, the thermostat turns the heat on. When it gets too hot, the heat switches off. In the same way, when our bodies, minds, and souls are lacking a certain substance, they develop a hunger for it. When we get enough of it, the hunger stops, and we move up the pyramid.

With this way of thinking, I have been able to define both work and personal priorities using the pyramid. I know I have some base hungers that need to be fed sufficiently in order to seek the peak. You can use the pyramid, too. All it takes is a willingness to be conscious about the priorities that you're seeking. Here are a couple of simple exercises: Think of the way you set your New Year's resolutions with respect to work. You may have some base-level needs you want to meet that are related to a raise or achieving some kind of financial incentive. I won't belabor this point because there are dozens of books that can help you get clear on how to manifest your financial goals. Your midlevel need may be winning some kind of recognition in your company or in your industry through excellent performance. You will have greater effectiveness in achieving that honor if you become conscious of that esteem goal at the start of the year and then develop an action plan that will help you succeed. Finally, at the peak of your work resolutions for the year could be something truly meaningful, like taking the lead in volunteering your company to philanthropically support some community program that is well aligned with your company's values and mission. While these three ideas on the three different levels aren't earth shattering, they do provide you with a means of understanding your hierarchy of priorities in the workplace.

As another example, imagine you're going on a family vacation. You and your spouse have been working crazy hours, and it's finally that time of year when you've coordinated your schedules to take a break together. Where should you go? What should you do? What kind of pyramid would define your Hierarchy of Needs on this family vacation? I would imagine at the base you might be looking for an affordable place that's comfortable for your family. As you move up the pyramid, you and your family might make a list of all the other things you would be seeking. Then you can prioritize them as level one, two, or three needs, knowing that the lowest level (one) is foundational—the must haves, even though they might be a little mundane, because without them the higher needs may not be relevant—like making sure you have insect repellant for a camping trip. At the top of your pyramid would be the peak experiences you might be seeking on this vacation. These are the moments that you are most likely to remember, like when your kids cooked their first campfire meal.

Many friends and work associates are now regularly using the pyramid to help prioritize their lives. But often they get a little tripped up with the hierarchy of priorities—in other words, at which level of the pyramid a particular priority should be placed. As a guide, I often refer them to the Transformation Pyramid we discussed in Chapter Two. Take a look at whether this activity or priority is a survival need (something that will help provide basic sustenance or comfort), a success need (something that will enhance the performance or experience), or a transformation need (something less predictable, more intangible, and ultimately, most satisfying or memorable). My number one recommendation for those who are using a pyramid to define their peak experience is to make sure you are climbing the right mountain. A midlife crisis is perhaps the natural result of someone realizing they've perhaps climbed the wrong peak.

Climbing Higher

Using the pyramids as a guide requires a certain amount of introspection and mindfulness. It not only requires getting conscious about what you want or need; it also obligates you to create an order of priorities for those wants or needs. An insightful book called Power vs. Force helped me to look at this hierarchy in an even more metaphysical way, as I came to the conclusion that there are three states of being involved in how we interact with life. And of course, the three steps can be depicted on a pyramid, as shown below.

You can see these three steps manifested in both how a culture evolves and how humans often mature. The base needs are typically has needs: what material things we want in our life to give us safety, comfort, pleasure, or status. As humans and societies age, they move beyond the has to the does needs. As our material needs are met, what one does for a living becomes a more relevant symbol of our identity. At some point, relentless doing no longer carries currency, at which point the is needs predominate at the peak of the pyramid. You see this in wise men and women and in cultures that have learned that having and doing carry you only so far. When someone or something just is, it feels pure, essential, powerful, and magnetic. There is a strong sense of presence that accompanies this state of being. As for me, I spent my early years growing Joie de Vivre and focusing on how big we might become. My scorecard was defined by how many hotels we had in the collection. And, at times, I gauged my definition of success by the things I could buy for myself and for the company. At some point, I transcended has up to does and became more focused on my role as the CEO, enjoying the esteem associated with how people perceived me in that role. More recently, I have found myself moving more into an is place, going beyond my possessions and my role so that I can just try to be a voice of change for how the business world can be. I know that I'm on a self-actualized path when it feels like I'm almost channeling the message from the master, Abraham Maslow. You know you've moved to that is place when you realize that how you show up in the world has great impact on those who are learning from you. Great leaders don't count their successes by the number of cars in their garage or by the impressiveness of their job title. Great leaders know their success is defined by the personal impact they've had on others. Business is typically considered hard-edged and unemotional. But in more than two decades of running my own business, I found it to be a remarkable exercise in humanity. It has helped me change my life and understand myself and others better than 20 years of therapy ever would. Maslow has been a great guide for me. He's the first well-known psychologist to study healthy people as opposed to sick people. His insights about human motivation are relevant not just in our work life but even more so in our personal life.

Great business leaders create transformation: in themselves, their companies, and their people. And if they're truly transformational, they likely create peak experiences for their customers and investors, as well. Great leaders aren't afraid of scaling the peaks that few others are willing to climb. They recognize that while the ascent to the top may be strenuous, the feeling of accomplishment and, most importantly, the understanding that this is the real me will create both a soaring high and a deep sense of well-being that are unmatched.

My role with this book has been to act like a Himalayan Sherpa who guides you up to the rarified summits of Nepal or Tibet. I hope you have enjoyed the journey. I wish you the best on your path. I'll look forward to seeing you again at the peak.